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Saturday, January 29, 2011

Mobiles- What, Why and How

Up Until Andorid made its way into market,companies like Motorola, Samsung and Sony Erricson used to run on Java based OS. Before Android, IOS and Balckberry were the favoured OS on mobiles and Nokia was runner up with Symbian.

Nokia is still on Symbian, with thier latest Symbian^3, which didnt quite workout for them ! should have been released 2 years ago and it would have been a revolution! Blackberry has just step out for commoners, and its a whole new world, which is why i'll be discussing it in a new topic.

With smartphones crawling everywhere, almost every other player has relased some cool smartphone of thier own.
As of today, most smartphones run best OS possble on thier best hardware. Clearly one needs to key things which plays a vital role in functioning of a smartphone!

Most desired Hardware:
1) Fast processor- with release of A8 and A9 cortex most smartphones are clocked at 1GHz. With Tegra around the corner, soon most of them will run dual processors. Few smartphones like Nokia's N8 still have 600MHz processor along with 3D hardware accelerator.
This is required for performing Multitasking, HD video recording/Playback.

2) Memory - RAM/Useable Memory- RAM is again required for multitasking and HighEnd 3D games. Current standard is 256-512 MB. With most smartphone have the ability the expand their memory, thy have provided USer the benifit of deciding to himself.
Current industry standard is from anything 8GB to 32 GB.

3)Camera - With most smartphones supporting HD recording and Playback, its now a standard to have HD in the mobiles. Industry standard is 5-12 MP with 720P recording at 30FPS. Samsung Wave, Galaxy S, Iphone 4 starts at 5 MP while Nokia is at whopping 12MP with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon Flash !

4) Screen- Samsung revolutionsied the Mobile world with their Super AMOLED screens in Wave s8500 and Galaxy S. Iphone released IPS backlit display to which they refer as Retina Display is amazing too. Nokia could achive AMOLED only with their latest smartphone N8. Also one other feature that is considered is the size, where 3.3-3.7 inch was a standard until Q4 2010, which now changed to this ridiculously big screens from 4.0-5.0 inches.

5) SNS- Socail Network Integration, Samsung released the SNS Hub, one touch access to IM, Facebook, Twitter, Email! HTC came up with HTC Touch Sense which has similar features. Motorola has comeup with its own UI, Moto Blur, which is not the best, but gets the work done. With more people hooked to social networking i would consider this a very important feature.

6) Battery- Every other feature in smartphone added comes at a price of battery consumption. Its always necessary to have a better battery for longer life. Market standard rates batteries on mAh, most smartphones have somewhere from 1200 mAh to 1500 mAh.

7) Misc- GPS, Radio, Geo Tagging, Free Navigation, Apps fall under a catergory which is left to user discretion.

Most desired OS:
1) Android- Brain child of Google, developed over the years. From cupcake 1.5, donut 1.6, eclair 2.1 , froyo 2.2 and the latest Gingerbread 2.3 , it has beaten all. With 3.0 version optimized for Tablets, its the FUTURE! Android, Linux based, open source OS lets you do pretty much whatever you want when it comes to developing. As of December 2010 there were about 200,000 games, applications and widgets available on the Android Market, with an estimated 2.5 billion total downloads.

2) IOS- Control freak Apple's OS, started in 2007 with major releases upto the latest 4.2 makes it one of the best OS. The same is currently running in Ipads as well. IOS hosts a legendry App Store containing more than 300,000 iOS applications, which have collectively been downloaded more than 10 billion times.
IOS is known for the best user interface and experience! which I personally agree to some extent..

3) Symbian- Developed by Symbian Inc, maintaned by NOkia, this OS comprmises 43.5% of world's smarphone's OS. It it self had 3 major releases fom Symbian1, also known as Symbian S60 for popular Nokia mobiles, Symbian2-lisenced and never used in mobiles and to the latest Symbian ^3. Nokia N8 was the first from Nokia to run this. I would like to say Nokia didnt make a good job here, with keeping the same old UI leading to a disaster in Smartphone market in Q4 2010 losing its sales by 26%. Nokia has its own app store , OVI which had more than 10 million downloads for the Q4 2010. Also with more features like OVI Maps, OVI mail, OVI Music , it easily tops any other app store. People love things when its FREE!

4) Bada- Samsungs first, Linux kernel based proprietry OS. Agreed that its still in infantacy stage, but looking at the work on UI and interface in thier first smartphone Samsung Wave s8500, I would say Bravo ! It combines the feature os IOS and Android, where you can have widgets on home screen like andriod and an app interface similar to IOS! even though it has an app store worth just 5000 applications. Its hard to forsee the future when you are on bicycle while everyone is on Jet! They got a lot to catch up on that . Current version is 1.2 in most countries, while India is still waiting for an update.

In a nutshell, you need to keep the keys features in mind when you look for a smartphone.

I would discuss Blackberry and its OS in someother topic as its whole new other world!
Thanks for reading guys! Comments, Suggestions, Complaints pen it down!